Kids At Work: Latinx Families Selling Food on the Streets of Los Angeles
Street food markets have become wildly popular in Los Angeles—and behind the scenes, Latinx children have been instrumental in making these small informal businesses grow. In Kids at Work, I shine a light on the surprising labor of these young workers, providing the first ethnography on the participation of Latinx children in street vending.
Drawing on dozens of interviews with children and their undocumented parents, as well as three years spent on the streets shadowing families at work, I highlight the unique set of hardships Latinx youth experience in this occupation. I also shed light on how these hardships can serve to cement family bonds, develop empathy towards parents, encourage hard work, and support children—and their parents—in their efforts to make a living together in the United States.
“Emir Estrada’s insightful ethnography reveals the complexity of the household economy of undocumented and mixed-status families in Los Angeles, from the standpoint of children who work as street vendors. Kids at Work forces a reconsideration of traditional notions of childhood, family relations, and work, by demonstrating how children – with their own agency and decision-making capacity – enter into mutually supportive and protective family and work arrangements with their parents to make ends meet.”
— Zulema Valdez, author of Entrepreneurs and the Search for the American Dream
"Estrada balances methodological rigor with great empathy—likely partially rooted in her own experiences as a teen vendor—to develop a deeply insightful and nuanced analysis of the lives of immigrant children street vendors in Los Angeles. Written clearly and accessibly, the book reveals the structural context in which vending becomes necessary, while underscoring the children’s agency that allows them to find meaning in the work they do to help support their families and their own aspirations. Kids at Work will make readers not only notice, but also appreciate youth whose public labor challenges social notions of childhood in powerfully gendered and racialized ways."
-Leisy J. Abrego,author of Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across Borders